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Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Technology woven into the DNA at Vail Resorts - Feb 18

Vail Resorts EpicMix App - Courtesy of Vail Resorts

In the old days of communicating customer service,
something so insignificant as a ski lift pass would not really have provided
managers with much opportunity. It used to be a scrap of paper, attached to a
jacket with a metal or plastic clip, flapping in the wind and getting caught on
tree branches and other obstacles, but needing to be visible to lift
attendants. However, with modern “smart card” technology, ski resorts all over
the world now use lift passes for all manner of conveniences, including automatic
access to ski lifts, keeping the pass inside a pocket, and doubling it up as a
resort credit card.

An early adopter in the USA was Vail Resortswhich has continued to investigate every nuance of
smart card technology. “One of our biggest developments for the 2014-15 ski
season was the introduction of Express Ticketing,” says Robert Urwiler, Chief
Information Officer for Vail
Resorts. “Express Ticketing gives our guests the ability to buy tickets on
their mobile device right up to the minute that they need them. If they already
have ticket media, the product is loaded automatically. If not, we have express
lanes set up at ticket windows where guests can quickly pick up their media by
simply showing the confirmation bar code on their mobile phone.” Benefits are
two-fold. Firstly, it helps optimize
ticket window lines by giving people the means to move themselves through the
process very quickly. And, secondly, it provides more complete customer
information than a resort might get through a traditional ticket window
transaction.
“In addition to Express Ticketing and
other technology feature introductions and improvements across the resorts, we
continue to make advancements in the sophistication and use of our CRM and Predictive
Analytics capabilities,” Urwiler adds. “The objective of these efforts is to
drive more focused and targeted guest interaction across communication
channels. We are constantly looking for better ways to engage our past,
current, and future customers with targeted and relevant messages delivered at
the appropriate time and place.Ultimately, this helps drive business.”

The radio-frequency enabled Epicmix card is a hands-free season or day
pass which can also be linked with a credit card to be used as resort charge
for spending while on-mountain. The hard card media can be used year after year,
rather than necessitating replacements every season. Furthermore, all hard card
media can be linked to the free EpicMix
ski app, enabling the user to capture their on-mountain activity and share it
with friends and family directly from the app on Facebook and Twitter. EpicMixallows
guests to track their vertical feet, days skied, pins earned, Leaderboard
status, photos taken by professional on-mountain photographers, race medals
earned and even track progress in Ski and Snowboard School. Going a step
further, EpicMix introduced two revolutionary brands during the 2014/2015
season – EpicMix Guide and EpicMix Challenges. EpicMix Guide provides
customized run itineraries for guests based on location, ability level and
desired duration while EpicMix Challenges allows guests to compete against
themselves, friends and the community. “We’ve delivered six major releases of
EpicMix to our guests including feature sets focused on stats/pins, photo,
race, academy, guide, and, recently, challenges,” Urwiler explains. “Challenges
allows our guests to set goals for the day, vacation, or season and share the
achievement of those goals socially.”

Epicmixers can share accomplishments individually or
chose to share a compilation of their day’s achievements directly to social
media from the free EpicMix iOS or Android app. The strategy behind all this
has several advantages. “Overall, our business objective for EpicMixis
to create an unobtrusive digital companion to our guest’s skiing and riding
experience with a focus on recording their on-mountain experiences,” says
Urwiler. “This gives our guests the ability to re-live their experiences
digitally and to share those experiences socially.This, in essence, helps to create hundreds of
thousands of brand advocates for Vail Resorts on social media while also
helping to drive our CRM efforts through a better understanding of guest
behavior.”

EpicMix collage by Louise and Simon Hudson

Since the launch of EpicMixin 2010/2011, the innovative idea captured the
attention of prominent travel and ski journalists resulting in many articles in
magazines and newspapers including the prestigious travel section of the Los
Angeles Times, Skiing magazine and Denver’s Huffington Post. Furthermore,
the app has secured Vail
Resorts coverage in more unusual outlets for a ski company such as
Mashable, CNET, Wired, Popular Mechanics, FastCompany, and other tech-focused
publications. Stacey Pool, Sr. Director, Digital Experience for Vail Resorts, says that by far the most successful generation of EpicMixhas been EpicMix photo, which resonates with
every guest, both destination and local.“We’re always watching the different social platforms where our guests
seem to be engaging and trying to figure out a way for those guests to share EpicMixcontent in those platforms,” she adds.
Understanding the demographic, target market and appropriate content is crucial
to the company’s social media strategy. “We want the content to speak to our guest and inspire them to take
action, whether that’s engaging with us on these social platforms, sharing our
content with others, or clicking through into our sites,” says Pool. The
predominant focus in 2015 was on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. “As the
different platforms evolve, and there starts to be real-time streaming within
some of the new social platforms, we want to adapt our strategy to fill in any
possible gaps along the customer journey,” she explains.

EpicMix Photographer at work

With technology use now woven into the DNA of the
company, Vail Resorts
is recognized world wide as a pioneer in the field of social media marketing,
combining indirect marketing with customer service and added value. Ski resorts
have traditionally charged for photographic services on the hill and usually
don’t provide any action shots. Vail Resorts saw the
value in advertising spin-offs of providing photos for free in order to encourage
skiers and snowboarders to send out more professional-looking tweets and
Facebook photos of themselves. Vail Resorts was also the
first ski hill to use its lift pass system as an app. They have created their
own resort blogs about EpicMix with
information as well as testimonials from consumers. “As a company we are very
fortunate to have a tech-savvy CEO who has a real passion for leveraging
technology to facilitate a better guest experience while driving our business,”
Urwiler concludes. “Our core values include striving to constantly re-imagine
all aspects of our business through creative and innovative collaboration. With
Rob (Katz) and our entire Executive Team as partners, we will continue to
develop advanced CRM and Analytics capabilities, cross-platform digital
experiences, and technology-enabled process improvements to ultimately help
create an Experience of a Lifetime
for every guest that we engage through every stage of the interaction
lifecycle.”

And, as Urwiler says, it is not just
youthful skiers and riders who are taking advantage of EpicMix in Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone, Breckenridge, Park City, Heavenly, Northstar, Kirkwood, Afton Alps and Mt
Brighton. All age groups are enthralled with
tracking stats, outdoing previous performances and crowing to their
office-bound buddies back home about their skiing experiences. And it is
attracting locals as well as tourists. The Epic Pass
has also evolved into a very useful and affordable season pass. Offers for
locals at Park City,
for example, were as low as $579 if bought in advance for the 2015/16 season.
The pass would pay for itself in just four days, the advertising said, and give
access to nine Vail Resorts. New for
the 2014/15 season was the Season Pass Auto Renewal Program, enabling automatic
renewal every year while guaranteeing the following season’s lowest price. The
program takes a $49 down payment in the spring with the remainder charged in
the fall.